BY QUENTIN PIGG

Raise the drawbridge, the Commies are coming for your Castle.

Unlike France, Germany and Switzerland, Britain is a nation of homeowners. One may even say home-owning has become a part of British culture – that is, if we are still permitted to hold any semblance of culture which extends beyond the ubiquitous duty of ‘tolerance’.

If tolerance is to be all that’s left of Britishness, then it seems Labour has become decidedly un-British. The bane of their tolerance being aspiration; something which, when expressed by the working classes, threatens to smash Labour’s paternalistic and romanticised view of them as noble peasant workers and their children as the emaciated chimney urchins of yore.

This goes some way to explaining the left’s inveterate hatred towards Margaret Thatcher as it was she who sought to harness the ambition of the working class with radical housing reforms. Whilst Thatcher’s ‘Right to Buy’ scheme helped free people from the shackles of the state, Labour are now poised, hammer and sickle in hand, to fashion new chains with what is essentially a ‘Right to Steal’ scheme.

Working class hero, Lady Nugee, made an appearance on the soon-to-be-axed Victoria Derbyshire show to outline her proposed policy. Appearing her usual smug self, looking not so much like the cat that got the cream but rather the puss that pillaged the creamery, she explained with little shame how her government would requisition land and any private property deemed to be empty.

‘What, you mean you would just take it off somebody who has bought it?’ asked an aghast Victoria Derbyshire, to which Nugee replied: ‘Use it or lose it’ – an adage often espoused by personal trainers in regard to muscle, not that one can accuse Lady Nugee of having lifted the phrase from such an environment.

There’s no longer any pretence from Labour to be offering us ‘democratic socialism’ – which is really just Communism with lube – and no more comparisons to Sweden as Labour’s Utopian vision – have they finally realised that welfare funded by a free market isn’t what Marx had in mind?

This authoritarian land-grabbing streak isn’t confined to those with titles of nobility if this video from the US is anything to go by. At 5:25 the student asserts ‘personal property is a capitalistic notion’ and then goes on to say ‘private ownership is, like, directly related to exploitation.’ It would perhaps be remiss not to point out that Lady Nugee owns rather a few ‘capitalistic notions‘ herself, the one she chooses to reside in being worth over £2.9 million.

Some may argue that the popularity Communism enjoys from today’s youth is an inevitable outcome of them finding it harder to get on the property ladder. The received wisdom is that this is due to an uncontrolled rising of house prices, but this is simply isn’t the case. Previous property hotspots in the South are now stalling if not reversing in value, whilst some areas in the North, such as Yorkshire, gain traction. First time buyers aren’t being priced out of the market as outside of London and the South East there is plenty of affordable property. It is the tight restrictions imposed by Banks to secure mortgages which holds them back, but not an obstacle that can’t be overcome by saving and demonstrating fiscal responsibility.

Although there is currently a lull in the British housing market, as long as the demand for housing continues to outweigh its supply, the diminished growth is ensured to be small term and property will remain a valuable asset for anyone of any class to invest in – you needn’t be a Lady to do so. If Labour are hellbent on closing the gap between demand and supply, then they may wish to curtail their endless want for more immigration, and perhaps have a word with Shadow Secretary, Diane Abbott, who seems reticent to condemn even illegal immigration.

As Brexit has shown, the working class don’t much care to act as servile drones, so it stands to reason that any not-so-neo-Communist offerings from Labour won’t find much purchase in areas such as Durham, Workington or Bolsover; places that used to be bricks in Labour’s ‘red wall’.  Sorry, Labour, consider that wall requisitioned.